Boston's resilience will be tested again in Game 7

Saturday

May 13, 2017 at 5:20 PMMay 13, 2017 at 5:20 PM

Scott Souza The MetroWest Daily News

BOSTON — Brad Stevens has talked a lot about resilience in recent weeks.

The Celtics coach has talked about it in terms of how his team has responded to series deficits and blowout playoff losses. He has talked about it in terms of how his players responded to the emotional blow that their All-Star point guard endured when his sister was killed in a car crash on the eve of the postseason opener.

Each step along the way, the Celtics have found a way to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and focus their heads in a way that’s allowed them to bounce back from hardship triumphantly.

That resilience will be tested once more — in a way unlike any it’s been tested in most of these players’ careers — Monday night when the Celtics face the Washington Wizards in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals at TD Garden.

The Celtics went to Washington on Thursday in search of a knockout, and instead returned to their corner late Friday night tied on the scorecards heading into one final round. The black outfits they wore into the arena, the 12-1 run to end the first half, the five-point lead with 90 seconds left in the game, and the potential game-winning shot off the glass from Al Horford with 7.7 seconds on the clock all became a footnote to John Wall’s 27-foot haymaker that tied the series.

As Wall hopped up on the scorer’s table and danced on the grave of Boston’s plans to turn the night into a “funeral” for Washington’s season, the Celtics were forced to reconcile another chapter of a series that Horford said after the game the team felt it had “under wraps” in the final minutes.

No player will have a longer 72 hours between games than Isaiah Thomas.

The two-time All-Star, who has dealt with both the personal tragedy of his sister’s death and the physical pain of suffering lost and fractured teeth in the past four weeks, struggled with his shot for most of Friday’s Game 6 before appearing to regain his stroke just in time to be the conquering hero on a foreign court.

It was his step-back baseline jumper and pull-up 3-pointer that put the Celtics up 87-82 with less than two minutes to go. But it was his turnover, his shot that was blocked, and his launch that caught back iron at the buzzer, that helped the Wizards survive the game and the series.

After the game, he talked about looking forward to Monday’s Game 7. He talked about that being “where all the great players make their name” and “where legends are born.”

He will get his chance to augment the legend he has already built in these playoffs. But, unlike Game 2 when he scored 29 of his 53 points in the fourth quarter and overtime, he probably won’t be able to do it alone.

He will probably need a third straight offensive game like the one the Celtics got out of Avery Bradley Friday night when he followed his playoff career-high 29 points in Game 5 with 27 more in Game 6. He will need another big effort on both ends of the court from Horford, who had 20 points on 8-of-12 shooting in Game 6 after hitting eight of nine shots in the Game 5 victory.

He will need Jae Crowder and Kelly Olynyk to knock down the open shots behind the arc when he gets them the ball after two and three Washington defenders swarm him on the perimeter or in the paint. He will need a much better bench effort than the Celtics got on Friday when the reserves combined to shoot just 2-of-15.

He will need his coach to make some tweaks to what the Celtics saw out of the Wizards in Game 6, and he will have to be chiefly responsible for executing those adjustments on the court.

After a film session on Saturday, the Celtics will get back to work on the court Sunday afternoon in preparation for a night when they can once again rise to the occasion and silence doubters. Only this time — for the first time — they will do so knowing that, if they fail, there will be no second chance to make it right.

“This team doesn’t get too high or too low,” Stevens said following Game 5 when again asked about his team’s resiliency. “It’s been very consistent in that manner the whole year.